Upopoy: A Museum in the First Person

Scissors, a razor, and a whetstone entered an Ainu museum's account of working life. They belonged to Iboshi Keizō, who ran a barber and beauty salon in Bibai, Hokkaidō. Born in 1914, he had lived through discrimination and had not publicly identified his Ainu background. Decades after his death in 1979, his family discussed whether to cooperate with the museum. Their contribution brought his two daughters' recollections into an exhibition announced in December 2025.^[1]

The tools would identify a trade without those recollections. They would not, by themselves, explain a father's silence or his family's later decision to speak. Displaying them required more than recognizing an object as worth collecting. It required people to decide how an ordinary working life should become public history.

That process runs through Upopoy, the National Ainu Museum and Park at Shiraoi. Its exhibitions speak in the first person: “Our History,” “Our Work,” “Our Language.”^[1] The small word our carries a substantial question. How does a national museum produce a collective account without making the people within it interchangeable?

Upopoy opened beside Lake Poroto on 12 July 2020. Its institutional beginnings lay in a sequence of national decisions: the Diet's 2008 resolution recognizing the Ainu as an Indigenous people, a proposal for a symbolic cultural space, and the cabinet's 2014 choice of Shiraoi. In 2018, two foundations merged to form the Foundation for Ainu Culture, which would operate the new complex.^[2]

The choice of place connected this national project with an existing Ainu institution. The former Ainu Museum had operated in Shiraoi for more than thirty years before closing in March 2018. Founded by Ainu people, it combined exhibitions and performing arts with exchanges involving other Indigenous peoples. Upopoy's own institutional history acknowledges that earlier work, alongside the damage to Ainu livelihoods and language associated with state policies and discrimination.^[3]

National status therefore did not introduce Ainu cultural interpretation into an empty space. It changed the scale and organization of something already being done. Collections, relationships, and experience existed before the new buildings; the buildings brought a different administrative structure and public remit.

Museum director Sasaki Shirō's account of the preparations makes that structure concrete. A committee convened in 2012 included representatives of the Ainu Association of Hokkaido, the former museum, local and prefectural government, and researchers. A preparation office began operating at Hokkaidō University in 2015. The eventual plan included storage, research rooms, training, and education, as well as galleries.^[4]

Those less visible functions matter to the kind of history a museum can tell. A gallery presents a finished selection. Storage allows other objects to remain available; research can change their attribution; training gives more people the means to interpret them. The public account depends on work that visitors need not witness.

Yet these different participants did not become one author merely by joining a project. A ministry could define the institution's remit, while a family could supply knowledge of a particular person. A scholar could compare records, while a speaker could challenge a translation. The museum's first-person voice emerged from these encounters, rather than from a single speaker given a larger microphone.

The permanent exhibition has a central plaza with themed areas around it. Visitors can move outward into language, spiritual life, everyday living, history, work, or exchange. They are not required to follow one chronological passage from an ancient beginning to a final modern display.^[1]

That arrangement makes a useful possibility available: the same person can belong to several histories at once. Work is not confined to a distant hunting economy, and speaking a language is not confined to an early stage of a timeline. A modern occupation need not mark the point where an Indigenous history ends.

The museum researcher Sekiguchi Yoshihiko has examined precisely this difficulty. In a 2022 research note, he warns that replacing an old opposition between “primitive” and “civilized” with a division between “traditional” and “modern” can preserve the underlying problem. People still appear to pass from one complete category into another.^[5]

His discussion draws on interviews with Ainu people who moved to the Tokyo region. Some had wanted distance from discrimination in Hokkaidō, yet later joined cultural activities. Participation could bring enjoyment, hesitation, or pressure to know more about their heritage than they did. Their accounts do not form a single progression from concealment to confident public identity.^[5]

This gives the barber's equipment a place within the larger exhibition problem. The choice is not between an old object that looks distinctively Ainu and a newer object that looks familiar to everyone else. The historical question concerns the life to which an object belonged. Ordinary tools can acquire a different significance when their user's circumstances become known.

A thematic exhibition cannot ensure that every visitor will make this connection. Its contribution is more specific: it puts different activities within the same account and leaves room for a person to be understood through more than an ethnic costume or a single public role. The next challenge is how to name those activities without flattening their differences.

A museum label can seem like the smallest part of an exhibition. It is also the point where an institution tells a visitor exactly what something is.

Curator Kobayashi Miki's report on the opening displays describes a problem hidden by the English phrase “ceremonial crown.” Different Ainu regions used different names. Where an object's regional history was known, the label used the corresponding form; where it was not, several forms could appear together. Some headband labels omitted Ainu terminology because the relation among names, shapes, uses, and regions had not been established securely enough.^[6]

The omission was not evidence that Ainu lacked words for headwear. It marked a limit in the museum's ability to assign the right word to that particular object. Placing an Ainu term first on a label created an obligation to get the relationship right, rather than simply supplying an Indigenous-looking equivalent for a Japanese category.

A different decision arose while preparing a panel about place names. The linguist Satō Tomomi worked with an Ainu collaborator on wording that referred to “our ancestors.” The collaborator proposed replacing a-sinric with ci-sinric. In the distinction discussed by Satō, the first form includes the listener within “we”; the second does not. The intended ancestors were those of the Ainu speakers, not automatically those of everyone reading the panel.^[7]

The revision clarified who was addressing whom. A visitor could be welcomed into an explanation without being assigned the speaker's ancestry. In English or Japanese, a phrase like “our ancestors” can leave that relationship implicit. This Ainu wording required the translators to decide it.

Satō describes another correction to his own expectation. He had assumed that a general expression for “place name” might need to be constructed; his collaborator found the recorded term sinre. Archival knowledge, living language work, and linguistic analysis were contributing different things to the same text.^[7]

The label and the panel show two kinds of precision. One connects an object with a regional name. The other connects a statement with its speaker. Neither can be obtained just by changing the language of a heading. Both require attention to the people and relationships concealed inside apparently straightforward words.

Akemi Oshino brings another kind of authorship into Upopoy. In an account published in 2023, she describes learning from her grandmother in Mukawa and later receiving university training. Formal study provided a broad foundation; family life supplied the local detail through which that foundation became personally meaningful. Working at Shiraoi did not erase the difference between Mukawa and Shiraoi traditions.^[8]

Her family also contributed a material connection. Oshino and her twin sister inherited their grandmother's tamasay, a necklace worn on special occasions. The grandmother had received it from an older relative. Oshino reported that the heirloom was displayed in the museum's interactive exhibition in 2023.^[8]

A necklace can be described through its components or classified by use. Family knowledge adds a sequence of relationships: who received it, who kept it, and who inherited it. Those relationships do not disappear when the object becomes useful to a museum. They explain why this example is not simply interchangeable with another necklace of the same general type.

Oshino and her sister, Rika Akiyama, also co-authored a research report on the teachings of their grandmother, Yoshimura Fuyuko. Its published summary identifies two Upopoy educational programs initiated by the sisters, with support from the museum and the Cultural Promotion Department. Their role extended from supplying information to proposing how it would be taught.^[9]

This is a particular, documented form of participation. It does not require imagining the family as standing wholly outside professional museum work. The sisters could be relatives, inheritors, researchers, and employees at the same time. Each relationship gave them a different reason to examine the material and a different responsibility toward it.

The resulting knowledge remained local even when presented in a national institution. A museum can make a Mukawa account available to a broad public without turning it into the single account of every Ainu family. Its reach expands; the account's origin still needs to remain attached.

Outside the museum, Upopoy's kotan—a term for a village or community—contains reconstructed thatched cise, or houses. Other buildings provide spaces for performance, cooking, craft demonstrations, and school programs. This is a modern arrangement for learning, with different settings for different kinds of encounter.^[10]

The reconstructed house solves a problem a small display case cannot. A visitor can understand a room as a space organized around activities, while an explanation relates objects to that setting. A performance, in turn, can make rhythm or coordinated movement available in ways that a written description cannot. These forms of presentation supplement one another because they communicate differently.

They also create a possible misunderstanding. An instructor standing in a reconstructed house can be mistaken for someone whose everyday life belongs to the period being explained. Oshino recalled visitors asking whether Ainu people still existed. Her answer was personal: she was Ainu, living a contemporary life while working to introduce inherited knowledge.^[8]

A reconstruction can therefore require two explanations at once. One concerns the earlier house and its uses. The other concerns the present person interpreting it. Erasing the second would turn a professional's knowledge into an apparently automatic property of the scenery.

There is a comparable distinction between an educational activity and the practice from which it draws. Upopoy's own account identifies, for example, an archery activity using a simplified bow. The equipment is selected for a learning exercise, not presented as every participant's entry into an unchanged historical hunt.^[10]

Such adaptation is part of what a cultural institution does: it chooses an accessible portion of a larger practice and supplies an occasion for learning it. The historical relationship becomes clearer when the choice is visible. A short encounter can introduce a subject without claiming to contain a whole livelihood, belief, or language.

The museum and park thus bring different kinds of presence together. Some things are old; some are newly made; some are remembered; some are being performed by people who learned them. The date of an object cannot, on its own, date the people standing beside it.

A separate part of Upopoy makes the question of institutional custody more consequential. On a hill east of Lake Poroto, the Memorial Site holds ancestral remains and provides a place for commemorative rites. It is distinct from the museum's public exhibitions.^[11]

Ainu remains had been excavated and retained by universities and other institutions during research into the peoples of the Japanese archipelago. Some graves were excavated without the consent of Ainu residents or relatives. The government's 2014 policy proposed returning remains and transferring those that could not immediately be returned to a facility at Upopoy. The Memorial Site was established in 2019; transfers and Ainu rites began before the museum opened in 2020.^[11][12]

The official purpose is interim care pending arrangements for return. That is different from treating centralized custody as a completed return to a community. A building can provide storage and a ceremonial setting while questions about the appropriate recipients and destination remain unresolved.

Critics have challenged the arrangements on those grounds. In a 2022 commentary, CEMiPoS researchers Mashiyat Zaman, Leni Charbonneau, and Hiroshi Maruyama argued that cultural promotion and centralized custody did not satisfy demands for Ainu control over ancestral remains and related decisions. Their criticism concerns authority, not simply whether a new memorial building is respectful in appearance.^[12]

The institutional account and the criticism address different tests. The former describes a facility intended to hold remains while returns are arranged. The latter asks who determines the arrangements and whether they meet the wishes of the people seeking return. The existence of the facility alone cannot answer the second question.

Here, the museum's language of “our” encounters a limit that careful captions cannot settle. An explanation can identify whose ancestors are being discussed. It cannot substitute for the practical decisions governing where their remains will be kept. The Memorial Site belongs in Upopoy's history because it makes that distinction physical, at a separate location with a different purpose.

One documented return shows what happens beyond that central facility. In January 2023, the remains of eleven Ainu ancestors were returned from Upopoy to Eniwa. The Eniwa Ainu Association held a welcoming ceremony that October. These remains had been uncovered during road and river works in 1987 and 2013, then kept at Sapporo Medical College; the associated grave goods had remained locally in Eniwa.^[13]

The university's account describes years of discussion by the association and support from the city's Board of Education for local mortuary facilities. The return linked people, objects, a destination, and arrangements for care. It was a particular local process, not a measure of how every outstanding case would proceed.^[13]

Its significance for Upopoy is that a central institution can be part of a history whose intended next step lies elsewhere. Receiving something does not always make its permanent retention the goal. The place from which a return occurs remains important, but so does the community and setting to which it goes.

That outward connection also helps make sense of the museum and park, without equating their collections with ancestral remains. Family recollections do not begin when a museum records them. Regional language does not originate on a museum panel. People arrive with histories and obligations that extend beyond the institution's boundaries.

Upopoy's first-person account is consequently most intelligible when its contributing voices remain identifiable: a family deciding to speak, a translator changing a pronoun, sisters developing a program, a local association arranging a return. The national setting brings these processes into public view. It does not make them the same process, or relieve the institution of explaining where its authority ends and another person's knowledge or decision begins.